


The Day You Went Away

by Jaicen5



Category: The Professionals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-04
Updated: 2012-04-04
Packaged: 2017-11-03 00:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaicen5/pseuds/Jaicen5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A matching vid and fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Day You Went Away

I was playing around with merging images and created a couple I was pleased with, so needed a vid to show them off in. I was requested to write a fic to go with it. 

 

 

**DOYLE & BODIE - THE DAY YOU WENT AWAY**.

To be viewed in conjunction with vid by the same name:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD-EAdTqHLI>

<http://www.4shared.com/file/rS2sb72P/The_Day_You_Went_Away.html>

 

_I do not own these characters nor claim any right to do so.  
This fanfic is purely for entertainment purposes only_

 

 

_“You scared?”_

_“Yeah.” The eyes were invisible behind the dark sunglasses, “You?”_

_“Yeah,” I admitted. “All the time.”_

 

I lay drowsily in my sleeping bag, as Doyle sat beside me, cleaning his gun. Talk about Déjà vu. The scene was grimly familiar. Different house, different target, but essentially the same job. Protect an important man, and to that extent we were spending the night inside this empty manor home, guarding it from a repeat performance of the Parsali job. Only this time we’d checked the attic several times, just to be sure and I’d even climbed up on the roof. Never let it be said that we’d hadn’t learned from the last time. It didn’t settle the nerves though. I don’t think anything would with this sort of set up. The waiting was always much much worse than the action.

Doyle was talking softly, focused on his weapon, something about what happens after death, and whether there is an afterlife. A peculiarity of Doyle’s, that. Before a tense situation, he talked to settle his nerves, where I preferred quiet. If he was going to talk though, he could pick a better topic.

“Cut it out, Doyle”

“I was only saying….”

I sighed tiredly, “I know what you’re saying but there’s no point.”

My partner peered down the chamber of the gun and blew into it lightly. “Why’s that then?”

I watched him sleepily, fine boned hands and long fingers busy, his total absorption on the weapon, eyes narrowed in concentration, but I could tell his thoughts were on the Parsali job, how close we’d come to getting killed that time. Everything Doyle feels shows in his eyes. Greenish blue they are, quite different from my own dark blue ones and a big hit with the birds. They go ga ga over them. Even that older one in the typing pool, the one that had to be in her mid forties at least. I’ve seen her go all over soft when Doyle looks at her.

I turned over and pulled the sleeping bag up over my shoulder, refusing to be part of such a morbid conversation. I couldn’t ever imagine Doyle not being there, where he belonged, backing me up.

“Because, sunshine, you aren’t going anywhere, got to watch my back, haven’t you?”

Doyle’s soft snort was the last thing I heard as sleep pulled me down.

****

I woke early, soft sunlight spilling through the windows and teasing my eyes open. I saw Doyle was already awake, stretching, t-shirt clinging to long lean muscles, that restless energy he had in buckets already imbuing his movements. I watched the fingers of his right hand come around and massage his side, travelling up his chest to his heart, where the scar tissue still itched. He turned and caught my expression and his own hardened, as though warning me not to say anything.

I didn’t, dropping my gaze guiltily. Doyle knew me well. Yeah he knew me, but did I ever make him wonder what’s on my mind? What I thought, deep down inside.

How I’d felt after that Chinese bitch shot him, that I hadn’t been there for him. Sitting in that bloody hospital, willing him to come back, and frightened to death that he wouldn’t. That in the few assignments we’d been given since he returned to duty had me so overprotective that I was constantly running back to his side. Praying to a God I no longer believed in to keep him safe.

But nothing could prevent the non fatal bullets, the ones that Geraldine Mathers and Anne Holly had fired, each one finding their target in his heart as surely as Mayli’s had. I’d been there for him then. And after an initial protest, he’d let me.

He didn’t know about the blasting I gave Cowley over his first assignment after being cleared fit. Bloody dangerous, for someone still recovering, to say the least. And I smiled inwardly at how he’d pretend to nod off to sleep whenever I voiced my concern.

Watching him now as he picked up his holster with steady hands, I don’t think he did. Wonder that is. He was leaving me behind.

I struggled out of my own sleeping bag and rasped my hands over my face, feeling whiskers scratch pleasantly against my fingers. I reached automatically for the battery powered shaver.

****

The van crashing through the front doors had taken us all by surprise. Masked men jumped from the vehicle, almost before it had come to a complete stop and more poured in through the rear doors. God knew what had happened to the men patrolling the outside. I saw Lewis go down clutching his side, saw Cowley push the VIP into a side room, slamming the door. Gunfire erupted from all directions. I saw Doyle vault a dead bodyguard and make for the stairs in pursuit of another. Taking out two of the masked men, I rolled and fired into the windscreen of the van. Murphy appeared from the wreckage of the front door and took out another one.

A machine gun fired a lethal burst at the closed door shielding Cowley and the visiting dignitaries. It disintegrated under deluge of wooden splinters. The machine gun’s handler moved forward to finish the job. I brought my revolver up and shot him. Lucas came haring in from the kitchen and took out another. Another burst of gunfire from upstairs had my head snapping up in alarm. Doyle. Dodging sporadic gunfire I ran for the stairs.

Dear God not again. I found him in an upstairs room. He was lying in a pool of blood, breath rattling in his throat. Shit, shit, shit, two in the chest and a lung gone by the sound of the gurgling that had replaced his breathing. And again I found myself praying to a God I didn’t believe in. Please, I’ve never lied to you. I don’t believe he’s mine, but he’s not yours either. Don’t take him yet.

I ripped the cushion covers off the chair he’d fallen against and shoved the material between his chest and shirt, hearing a faint grunt as I pressed hard. I glanced quickly at him while I worked. A blood bubble had formed on those full lips of his and I think I knew then… and yet I still fought the knowledge, still pleaded to a higher entity.

“Don’t Ray,” I whispered. “You can’t go, you have to watch my back, remember? God Ray, stay.”

He was looking at me. Those greenish blue eyes that all the birds were daft for. He didn’t look frightened, just sort of calm and accepting and the panic was back, full blown. _Leaving me behind._

Doctor Siegel couldn’t work miracles twice. I watched again from the gallery beside Cowley and it was surreal. A waste of time. He was leaving us.

****

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky on the day. As blue as the old blue goodbye, if you liked romantic clichés. Funny really. I thought for sure, that it would rain on a day like today.

I drove the hearse containing the coffin. There was opposition, but I’d insisted. He was my partner and he should have been beside me, not in the back in a bloody wooden box. I was quite blank, empty and heartsore. I hadn’t eaten, couldn’t remember ever having had an appetite. I hadn’t slept. I was operating on pure light headed auto pilot.

I stopped the vehicle by the graveside and turned my head slowly. As though I could feel his presence. It was a weird thing. Behind me they were removing the coffin. Ray’s coffin, but I didn’t feel him there. I felt him over there, by the chapel. I got out of the car and stared at the structure. A faint shimmer, a white tshirt. I walked slowly over and saw him, bloodstains and all. He turned to look at me and I smiled at him. _Leaving me sunshine?_

****

Cowley gave me a month off and I couldn’t remember the first three weeks of it. I returned to the chapel where I thought I’d seen Ray on the day of his funeral. The sun was bright again, the sky achingly blue. The vicar remembered me and smiled kindly at me. I allowed him to lead me inside. He gave me a candle.

“For your partner.” He said in his gentle voice. “Light a candle in remembrance of him.”

I lit the candle and could have told him it was a waste of time. As if I ever needed anyone or anything else to remember Ray for me.

I put flowers on Ray’s grave. So final. The simple marker blurred, the sky so bright it hurt my eyes. It should have been raining.

 

****

The assassin that had shot Ray had escaped. A bloody suicide mission if I’d ever seen one. But this one had panicked and escaped. Cowley stood in the room where it happened, staring at the bloodstain in the carpet. I stood slightly behind him, angry, sad, depressed.

“He was doing his job,” Cowley said.

“So we can all be a target for some maniac political assassin…”

“You’re presuming Bodie,” Cowley turned away. “I want facts. If it’s McColl we’ll get him.”

He left me there, staring at Ray’s blood, rusty brown on that awful carpet and I felt despair wash over me. What difference did it make? It wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing would.

It took me a couple of minutes to realise the room had brightened somewhat, although it was overcast outside. As though a ray of sunshine had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I stiffened as I felt something. Something at my back, something achingly familiar and oh so terribly missed.

I slid my eyes sideways, not daring to believe, to hope. It was shimmery, transparent, hovering just on the edge of my peripheral vision but it looked for all the world like Ray was standing there, jacket flung carelessly over his shoulder, legs crossed at the ankle, thumb hooked casually in his waistband. Watching me. As though daring me to give up. For a minute I didn’t move, stayed still, lest I find it wasn’t real. I didn’t turn around. Shaking I ran a hand through my hair and looked outside. The clouds were clearing away.

****

We found McColl holed up in a London bedsit in Notting Hill. Cowley briefed us before we went in. McCabe through the back, Lucas up the fire escape and I’d go through the front. Alone. I stood quietly, eyes intense on the blue exterior door. It was strange, not having Doyle here, and he would have been for sure, for a chance at McColl. Ooh yeah, I could just imagine it. He’d go in first and I’d follow after, running back to his side, covering him. Moving together like clockwork.

Cowley gave the signal and I was in, gun up held ready, prowling down the hallway, missing Ray like crazy. McColl’s door lay ahead of me, we didn’t know whether he was armed, or aware of our presence and I didn’t have my partner. But suddenly, I felt like I did. The hallway brightened, as though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and there he was, by the stairs, transparent, grey, ghostly. I looked at him hungrily, he was wearing those tight jeans, and a dark jacket and he held his gun in his hand. He gave me a steady look and waited for me, backing me up, beside me, where he belonged. I hesitated by the door suddenly realising that although he may have left me, he wouldn’t stop doing his job, wouldn’t stop guarding my back. And I felt like crying.

The sadness never left. We got McColl. I went to Ray’s grave and told him so. Silence, nothing, just the wind moving through the trees. I walked back to the car through the arbor. The wisteria was bare, withered sticks like skeletal fingers pointing to heaven. Ray wasn’t here, and yet, when I drove away, past the chapel, I almost thought I saw a white T-shirted figure turn and follow my progress.

Ray seemed to appear briefly, whenever I was in mortal danger, watching my back. I found myself eagerly waiting for him, placing myself carelessly at risk in an attempt to entice the visits. I lost weight, I lost concentration and I missed him to the point of pain. And sometimes, sometimes, it was as though he knew it. And disapproved. After one particularly nasty shootout on the river I turned to drink in the sight of him, only to see him walking slowly up the ramp away from me, fading till he was out of sight.

And I knew then, that I’d seen the last of him.

It was very rare I indulged in a joint, but I did it that night, trying to think of Ray leaving as if he’d merely caught a bus, or an airplane, but coming back someday. It was a pack of lies of course.

Inhaling the smoke, I remember the training runs we did around the very cemetery that Ray now lay in, forever in the comfort of the earth. He wasn’t coming back. It hurt. Hurt as the bright blue sky had, the day we buried him. It should have been raining. I inhaled again, closing my eyes.

****

A voice murmuring woke me up, I struggled to open eyes, heavy with fatigue. The voice was achingly familiar and I debated whether to stay in the half dream of hearing him so clearly, but the more I woke, the stronger the voice seemed to be.

I jolted upwards and saw him. Doyle, sitting there, calmly cleaning his gun, saying something incomprehensible about paradise in the afterlife. I struggled over, trying to take in my surroundings. The manor house of that last op. Coffee, some groceries, sleeping bags. Christ, I stared at him for a moment. Solid, healthy, dependable, he was there.

He wasn’t dead. He was alive.

He didn’t notice my shock, intent on checking the gun over, ensuring it was loaded and the safety catch on. Shaking, I reached blindly for the thermos that I’d left near the wall and poured us a cup each, wishing fervently that it was a bottle of scotch instead.

Doyle took the cup I proffered, still talking as if nothing had happened, and I slowly began to realise that it hadn’t. I couldn’t help it. I gave him a big smile, even laughed at his confusion.

“What’s up with you?” he asked, before scooting over to his own sleeping bag and crawling in.

I flopped back down, relief flooding me, healing the empty spot in my heart and said; “It was a just a bad dream.”

“Eh?” Doyle was buried down, eyes closed.

“Just thought of something. Cowley will be there ahead of you mate,” and he would, I thought, stretching out comfortably on my back. Ray wasn’t going anywhere if I had anything to do with it. And certainly not to the afterlife. “So where’s your paradise now then?”

****

For Bodie4me  
Because she asked.

Jaicen5

2010

With thanks to  
Ci5mates  
pmgms

 


End file.
